Smart contracts technology is rapidly maturing. Self-executing coded agreements are being harnessed to launch new digital assets and will soon be used by American corporations to issue shares of stock on a blockchain overseen by the state of Delaware.

But there is something impeding the technology, keeping its use largely confined, thus far, to the hothouse realm of cryptocurrencies.

Because of how blockchain transactions are recorded and verified by consensus, smart contracts are unable, on their own, to talk to external data feeds. That makes them excellent tools for playing in the Ethereum sandbox but not so useful in the outside world.

What is needed, experts say, are more and better "oracles," pieces of middleware by which smart contracts can receive, and act on, data from off-chain systems.

Only through oracles can smart contracts provide benefit to banks — or indeed do much more than move digital tokens around. A smart contract behaving like a financial instrument might need to know commodity or equity prices, for instance.

"Part of the reason that we're seeing Ethereum used almost exclusively for ICOs is that there is a lack of robust, general-purpose oracles today, and therefore it's very difficult to construct useful, interesting smart contracts," said Ari Juels, co-director of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech in New York, who recently became an adviser to the San Francisco startup SmartContract. "So I see it as an absolutely critical piece of infrastructure."

Sergey Nazarov, SmartContract's founder and CEO."Without data inputs and without payment outputs that users want to receive, it's difficult to imagine a financial agreement of any worth," says Sergey Nazarov, SmartContract's founder and CEO.SmartContract has made building better oracles its mission. The startup didn't invent the concept, nor is it the only company trying to enable smart contracts with real-world applications. But it is positioning itself to succeed.

SmartContract recently completed phase one of an implementation with Swift that will allow banks' back-office Swift systems to talk to smart contracts. That is meaningful because, if a smart contract can respond to a Swift message, it can send money in dollars or yen, not just in cryptocurrency.

"Without data inputs and without payment outputs that users want to receive, it's difficult to imagine a financial agreement of any worth," said Sergey Nazarov, SmartContract's founder and CEO.

SmartContract's work with the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication came about after the startup won the organization's Innotribe Industry Challenge earlier this year. The partnership so far amounts to "a successful proof of concept," Hazel Nolan, Swift's project manager for Innotribe innovation programs, said in a brief email.

SmartContract is already having concrete discussions with Swift about phase two of the implementation, according to Nazarov, and Nolan said her organization looks forward "to exploring potential opportunities to work together in the future."

If all goes well, 11,000 banks will eventually be able to use smart contracts to initiate payments.

SmartContract, despite its name, is not actually in the business of writing smart contracts. Nazarov sees his company instead as "an accelerant," connecting disparate systems.

To that end, he hopes soon to launch a network called ChainLink, in which various node operators will function as sellers of data or payments capabilities, and will be paid in LINK tokens, a new digital asset Nazarov intends to roll out this year.

SmartContract has been developing ChainLink for the past three years.

"This isn't an idea. This isn't a white paper. This isn't something on a whiteboard somewhere," Nazarov said.

The network is designed to empower an emerging business model in which oracles will be paid for what they offer, just as cryptocurrency miners are.

"Oracles are the new miners in the blockchain world," Patrick Murck, special counsel at the New York law firm Cooley, recalls saying at a conference last year. "And I still believe that's true."

Driving the business model will be the need for reliable data sources. In many cases, a single source won't be enough.

Murck gives an example: Let's say that two baseball fans want to bet on the outcome of a game between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. Each fan stakes one bitcoin, and they create a smart contract that will rely on a trusted, machine-readable data source — the ESPN sports wire — to learn who has won the game. At that point, the wagered cryptocurrency will be released to either the Yankees fan or the Red Sox fan.

Let's say the fans, devoted as they are, attend the game and see the Red Sox win five to four. But at ESPN somebody makes a transcription error and reverses those numbers. The error is immediately caught and corrected, but too late for our hapless Red Sox fan; the smart contract has already released the bitcoins to the wrong person.

"These errors in data happen all the time," said Murck, who is also a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

In financial systems, such a foul-up could be disastrous. The ChainLink network, says Nazarov, should provide an easy way to match up smart contracts with the information resources they need.

"You can go and say, 'I want to make bank payments from HSBC; here's what I'm willing to pay,' " Nazarov said.

SmartContract intends to launch an initial coin offering for its LINK token this fall, with a fundraising goal of $33 million. One billion tokens will be created, of which 35% will be distributed in the crowdsale. Another 35% will be given to node operators to kickstart the ChainLink ecosystem. SmartContract plans to retain the rest to cover ongoing development costs.

While the success of ChainLink is uncertain, oracles seem destined only to grow in importance over time.

"Smart contracts voraciously need data in order to do their job," Murck said. "Somebody's got to provide it."

TLDR version: -Oracles/middleware that connects smart contracts to external world-partnership with SWIFT (protocol for banks) and adoption by 11000 banks if successful-working prototype/proof of concept-product has been worked on for over 4 years-Devs are all killers. One of the new ones is director of engineering for Facebook-I think this will do very well (I think 50-100x isn't crazy talk in a 1 year time-frame)

Chainlink believes that part of the problem with today’s smart contract is a lack of outside connectivity. They believe that a secure network of oracles can solve this problem, and this is the product they aim to present. In looking it over, we noted that it would have very specialized uses, first and foremost, and that recognition of this fact would be crucial to the investor.Today, the lion’s share of traditional contractual agreements that have been digitally automated use external data to prove contractual performance, and require dataoutputs to be pushed to external systems. When smart contracts replace these oldercontractual mechanisms, they will require high-assurance versions of the same typesof data inputs and outputs.In essence, the overview of Chainlink is that they want to improve the usability of smart contracts for certain types of applications. This means their market will be smart contract providers and smart contract users. As I said earlier, it’s relatively niche, but that doesn’t mean it can’t carry a great deal of potential value. We’re going to try to remember that while everything to do with the blockchain is still, in essence, very niche, everything in that category is also expanding exponentially, at a rapid pace, including a market that would need smart contract services. They list a few types of smart contracts they will help immediately: securities, insurance, and trade finance.

Chainlink’s actual system will consist of two separate parts: on-chain and off-chain. These will have to interact in order to deliver the service. The system has to keep the results from oracles correct as well as allow oracles to make them independently. This is where the interesting part presents itself: an oracle could be someone like the New York Stock exchange providing accurate trade information, or the Visa network settling a transaction. The Chainlink technology aims to on-board them all in one fell swoop, itself acting as a (and low cost barrier to entry.)Chainlink Token

In order to compensate the off-chain needs of the Chainlink system, the LINK token is established to pay them. The token is required to perform this function, so its demand is therefore in relation to the number of other people doing the same thing. As with most of these token schemes, the real means test is when the system goes live and whether or not a lot of people join the network or not. If the answer is not, then the token has no inherent value since no one actually wants it – even if it remains having speculative value, enough demand must ultimately be generated for a token in order for it to have legs.

The LINK token is an ERC20 token, with the additional ERC223 “transfer and call” functionality of transfer (address, uint256, bytes), allowing tokens to be received and processed by contracts within a single transaction.

Distribution

There will be a total supply of 1,000,000,000 tokens. Further details on the actual token are yet unavailable, which is unfortunate, as details such as how many tokens are actually released to the public are important.

The whitepaper gives the least detail about the token itself, which is problematic. Here is the thing: the idea behind the system is sound, the technology being used to implement it is sold. But does it actually need an ICO to successfully launch? Why does it require its own token? It would seem obvious that the oracles themselves would have incentive to keep their network and access to their own data constant. This is just a question, it doesn’t mean it can’t work this way. The author only means to raise the question of whether or not more generic, protocol-level solutions may supercede Chainlink’s efforts in the natural flow of disruption.// -- Get exclusive consultation for as low as $249 per month on MoneyMakers.com -- //Team

The actual current team of Chainlink is just the pair Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis. One assumes they’ll hire the rest of the talent they need, but it is disconcerting to see just two people actually involved up to date.

Ellis previously worked at Pivotal Labs.

Nazarov’s qualifications seem to be that he was early to cryptocurrency.

This one can get an okay rating without a high team score, in any case.Verdict

We’re forced to make a verdict mostly based on the concept of the token – that it will be in demand because the service itself will be in demand. We’ll lend some credibility to the argument that smart contract as it were are not totally flexible enough for the market as it is, and presume that Chainlink, with the hype surrounding it, will be one of the early companies to market in servicing smart contracts with external data solutions.Risk

We think there could be a long period in which these tokens are in low demand, and during this time, people will be forced to hold the bag. -1.5 We think the legacy oracle networks that are being sought out to join the revolution will need some real incentives to do so. The value of the token will have to be there for them, as well as the value in disrupting their own existing business models. -1.5

Growth Potential

Extending the power and usability of smart contracts by default and extension extends the value and demand for the tokens on t 1,000,000,000hose networks. We think that if this project succeeds, it will be one of many tokens which sees an increase in value as a result. +3 Hype has built significantly around this ICO despite some crucial details regarding the token. We think that if you can get yourself a small basket of them and prepare to dump, there will be a window to do that. We say this with caution, since as we noted elsewhere in the article, there will likely be a period where the token will have a low value, by nature of the network establishing itself and demand for the token doing the same. +3 Tokens which do not have to fundamentally reshape some area of society to have an actual value at market are great. Let’s give another 2 points on these grounds.

Disposition

We arrive at a 5, or lukewarm for Chainlink. We fear that the lack of details may be attributable to the lack of a dedicated team, not just a desire to build hype. We wouldn’t put too much into it, but wouldn’t write it off or be surprised if it does extremely well, either.Investment Details

Great ICO! Also have extra accounts that I am selling, have a bunch available, 0.5 ETH each or best offer. Each account will allow you to contribute up to 7 ETH. I will send you a link to the official site that has the unique contribution address for each account, so you can send funds there and receive your tokens to the address you sent from without having to trust me. PM me if interested.

I can't see your team info. Also, why we need a middleware at all for smart-contracts?! How can you solve the missing 'outside connectivity' problem. Currently smart-contracts and crypto-currencies are for tech-aware users and this hold for at least 3-5 years.

They rewarded people that cheated during the crowdsaleThey rewarded people that cheated during the presaleBut worst of all they said they promised to only allocate 50 percent to the presale participants. Yet they allocated much much more.

This, amongst other things, were forcibly hidden from the public or blatantly lied about.

They rewarded people that cheated during the crowdsaleThey rewarded people that cheated during the presaleBut worst of all they said they promised to only allocate 50 percent to the presale participants. Yet they allocated much much more.

This, amongst other things, were forcibly hidden from the public or blatantly lied about.

They rewarded people that cheated during the crowdsaleThey rewarded people that cheated during the presaleBut worst of all they said they promised to only allocate 50 percent to the presale participants. Yet they allocated much much more.

This, amongst other things, were forcibly hidden from the public or blatantly lied about.

where is info on that? links,proof,etc.

I am a living proof. They controlled the funds displayed on their home page by a timer. When I moved my system time past the crowdsale start time, it displayed 29MM+ raised, leaving only 2MM+ for the actual crowdsale.And for some their contribution addresses have been unmasked before the crowdsale start time, I guess this is one of the reason for the cap to be filled soon.

When I commented about this on their slack, they banned me.

Got to know that they have refunded the ETH contributions which did not make it. And they have also distributed the LINK tokens.